Posted in Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on May 24th, 2009
Dax Sheppard plays a one-liner filled everyman who loses his job the same day that both his kooky mother and his geeky step-cousin move into his house while he is attempting to lower his sperm count as his wife wants to conceive a child. The setup is their right off the bat, the comic motions not hesitating to begin, and they play out in a traditional comic format that is both familiar and harmless.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on May 11th, 2009
Based on a play by Wallace Shawn (who also co-wrote the screenplay), this film is a day in the life of an unhappily married couple, played by Juliane Moore and Matthew Broderick, who don’t know what to do about said unhappiness. The story is simple but the paths each character take is not. After a bitter breakfast scene, they separately go about their day before meeting at a party in the evening where Marie may or may not leave Bruce once and for all.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on May 5th, 2009
Based on actual events at the University of Iowa in 1991 (which I did not know when I began watching), this film follows a young Chinese student named Liu Xing (played by Liu Ye) as he is accepted into a prestigious Cosmology research team based out of a Utah University. While working for a respected Cosmologist named Jake Reiser (played by Aidan Quinn) he makes his own revelations and theories that challenge that of his employer and mentor. This creates an obvious conflict between them which places his dreams of a Nobel Prize, and even just graduating at state if he decides to continue with his own theories and not Reiser’s.
Posted in Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on May 2nd, 2009
This is the second season of this prime time soap opera’s fourteen season run. This show is the stories of three couples who all live in the same cul-de-sac, along the second season addition of single temptress Abby Cunnigham (played by Donna Mills), whose role inspires the packaging’s amusing tag-line “Abby Cunnigham moves to Knots Landing. Do you know where your husband is?”
Posted in Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on April 8th, 2009
This is the fourth film in the Poison Ivy series and its star power has descended from Drew Barrymore, to Alyssa Milano, to Jaime Presley, and has finally fallen on Degrassi: The Next Generation actress Miriam McDonald; which is sure to fulfill a handful of strange Canuck fantasies.
McDonald plays Daisy, the new girl on campus who is apparently a “tom-girl” because she wears jeans…and is from the country (I guess). It’s a fish-out-of-water story to start where she is scoffed at by the cool girls for showing up in a taxi, and gets a meet-cute moment with the richest boy on campus. She turns out to be the biggest prospect in the whole Political Science Department, despite being a freshman, which makes her a target of the “Ivys.”
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Posted in Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on March 29th, 2009
“Chicano” is a term for a Mexican American (US born with Mexican ancestry).
El Chicano was and is a band that started in the late 60s as club players called The V.I.Ps (playing after hours at a Japanese restaurant in East Los Angeles) who became popular because of their jazzy approach to Latin rock. This musical approach was really defined by this band, as well as by Santana who started about the same time, and their songs became the anthems for the “Chicano Movement” around the late sixties and early seventies.
Posted in Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on March 25th, 2009
This set contains all of the episodes from the first season (or “series” as it is termed in the UK). The show follows a standard teen drama format of a group of high school friends, this time from Bristol. Each token stereotype is covered in the main characters (the quirky girl, the party animal, the dweeb, the cool guy & girl, the ethnic guy & girl, the gay guy) and each receives their own episode to focus on them, with a few ongoing romantic plots stringing all of their stories together. Each of said episodes ends with the focus character coming to some sort of new advancement or revelation in their lives (Example: the character with an eating disorder bites into a burger).
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